Anastasia Pshegodskaya Of Remote On How To Hire The Right Person
An Interview With Ken Babcock
Be mindful of the culture this person brings: Stepping away from the culture fit paradigm but taking control over the evolution of your company culture, understand the nuances of each individual in your team and what they will bring to the overall team culture.
When a company is looking to grow, the choice of who to hire can sometimes be an almost existential question. The right hire can dramatically grow a company, while the wrong hire can be very harmful to morale and growth. How can you know you are hiring the right person? What are the red flags that should warn you away from hiring someone? In this interview series, we are talking to business leaders who can share insights and stories from their experience about “How To Hire The Right Person”. As a part of this series I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Anastasia Pshegodskaya.
Anastasia is the Director of Talent Acquisition at Remote, one of the most fast-paced unicorn companies. In one year alone her team has hired 750+ team members and she’s always willing to share their story and global hiring best practices with the community.
Anastasia always said that a well-developed technology becomes magic in real life. She is extremely passionate about people, and the changes and impact brought by technologies for them — it drives her recruiting career and life.
Anastasia’s previous experience is focused heavily on Recruiting for big Tech industry players. Prior to Remote she built from scratch and led the Global Sourcing at GitLab and before that she was driving various recruiting initiatives at Uber, Dell, and a local data science start-up.
All her free time is devoted to her family and travelling, and she is still in search of an ideal mix of these two hobbies.
Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
Hello! I’m Anastasia, the Director of Talent Acquisition at Remote, a third-party global hiring one-stop service for companies looking to employ talent across the globe. I’ve been with Remote for a year and in this time my team has hired 750+ team members.
I have developed over 10 years of experience in the magical recruiting world and worked across a range of multinational and local tech companies, from start-ups right through to the corporate level. Prior to Remote, I built from scratch and led Global Sourcing at GitLab, and before that, I was driving various recruiting initiatives at Uber, Dell, and a local data science start-up.
Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?
Four years ago I was approached by GitLab, the largest all-remote company back in those days, which seemed like an absolutely wild idea to run your business before the pandemic happened! Working for an all-remote company opened my eyes to the possibilities of fully flexible and talent-driven team structures and hiring, and I’ve not looked back since!
What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?
Scaling Remote by 700% in less than a year definitely makes me proud! Remote’s team grew from under 100 people at the beginning of 2021 to more than 900 people today, and the recruiting team played a vital role in making that happen.
How about a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away?
My most recent learning would be to be bold and ambitious with scaling your very own Talent Acquisition team when you’re facing a huge hiring demand.
If the company is going at rocket speed, you need to get your Talent Acquisition team ready for this growth and prioritise organisational planning and hiring for this team so the team don’t get overly stretched, processes are clear and you can successfully grow the wider company.
How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?
I’ve been extremely lucky with the leaders who were guiding my career and I’m still connected and learning from them today.
I’m also mentoring a few people at the moment and for me, it’s not only a great opportunity to feel self-fulfilled as a leader and help others but also an opportunity for constant learning and stretching your own way of thinking.
Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?
I’ve been repeating the same thing in all my interviews but one of my former managers once told me that the main responsibility of a manager is to make other people shine.
I think this formula sums up beautifully everything I’m trying to emulate in my leadership style: trusting your team members, giving them enough autonomy and freedom, listening to them, and making sure that you give credit for their achievements and never compete with your own team.
Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s change paths a little bit. In my work, I focus on helping companies to simplify the process of creating documentation of their workflow, so I am particularly passionate about this question. Many times, a key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?
Remote is a global company that works asynchronously, meaning employees are empowered to work when they work best. For this to work effectively, we have to be big on documentation — you can find a lot of processes documented in our public handbook, for example. We also have a few trusted tools. The tools that we’re using extensively are Notion, Slack, Loom, and our ATS (Greenhouse).
My favourite technique to ensure your processes are well-documented is to ensure that whenever you can’t answer a question with a link from your knowledge base, you document it straight away — that’s the best habit you can form in your team.
The pandemic forced many companies to adapt. Implementing remote onboarding and professional development — in addition to maintaining culture — challenged organizations. Can you share with us the challenges you have faced, with remote onboarding and hiring? How have your internal processes evolved as a result?
The main challenge I faced is giving new team members enough time to adjust to the all-remote environment and get familiar with the tools and technologies we use to work as one. Once you start working, it’s extremely difficult to go back and catch up on this, so laying the foundation for workflows and a deep understanding of our system is vital.
For us, our solution to this is clear: The first week at Remote is precious — we have a very-well structured onboarding process that has different tasks and topics to cover in your first five days at the company and it’s absolutely async. On the second week of employment, we then start team-specific onboarding, which helps to set up all individuals for success and strong team integration.
With the Great Resignation/Reconsideration in full swing, many job seekers are reevaluating their priorities in selecting a role and an employer. How do you think this will influence companies’ approaches to hiring, talent management, and continuous learning?
I think the main thing companies need to do to curb the effects of the Great Resignation is a switch to a people-first mindset.
When you focus your hiring plan on values and clearly translate your mission to candidates in the interview process, you’re instantly able to see if that individual is aligned with your team and the wider company. It’s also a great way to demonstrate your goals in a people-focused way by showcasing how the company’s values translate into the day to day practices within your team.
It also goes without saying that companies should tap into the global candidate pool instead of hiring in a limited number of locations. The world of work has evolved to give companies access to the top candidates from across the globe with digital, remote and flexible ways of working and this should be embraced.
To keep your team members, it’s vital that they feel supported, stretched and engaged with their work so they’re constantly reaching their own personal goals, as well as pushing the company forward. At Remote, we are heavily investing in continuous feedback and learning from our teams and constantly building out our own training resources to foster a culture of continuous learning.
Super, thank you for sharing all of that. Next, let’s turn to the main focus of our discussion about hiring the right person. As you know, hiring can be very time consuming and difficult. Can you share 5 techniques that you use to identify the talent that would be best suited for the job you want to fill? Please share an example for each idea.
- Value-based interviewing: Embodying your values in the hiring process and making sure all interviewers are assessed on this throughout the hiring process.
- Hiring for potential: Evaluating whether a candidate has the right skills and attitude to grow as fast as your company is scaling and evolving.
- Be mindful of the culture this person brings: Stepping away from the culture fit paradigm but taking control over the evolution of your company culture, understand the nuances of each individual in your team and what they will bring to the overall team culture.
- Check your bias: Acknowledging and setting aside your biases and training your hiring teams to do the same to promote diversity and inclusion within your organisation and make sure your candidates share the same vision.
- Data-driven recruiting: Leverage your recruiting tools to become data-driven. To do this, use your ATS and other People teams to gain insights into your current teams’ demographics, experience and performance and convert this into a comprehensive talent mapping strategy.
In contrast, what are a few red flags that should warn you away from hiring someone?
I have to repeat it again: value misalignment. You can’t teach someone values; you can work on performance but it’s extremely hard to fix behaviours, so ensure your team is aligned on values, attitudes and behaviour from the get-go.
Lack of flexibility and versatility is also another red flag. In our current working environment, you need to be able to adapt and adjust really fast and embrace change and that should work both ways between the employee and the employer.
What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?
My recommendation is to keep it simple and stick to a SSOT. At Remote, we use our own bespoke product and also rely heavily on Notion and Workramp to ensure everyone is on the same page and projects run smoothly.
Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.
For me, there’s a huge opportunity for spreading opportunities to underserved locales and giving everyone a chance to get a well-paid job they deserve without a need to leave their hometown or a place that they enjoy living in. I already see this happening at Remote, and this makes me proud to be part of a forward-thinking, globally-minded company.
This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!
